Avatar: A Blue Christmas

We saw AVATAR last night in Imax 3-D, and had a great time.  It was bravura filmmaking, and a visual spectacle.  It looked like a bunch of Michael Whelan and Roger Dean paintings come to life.  It made efforts toward scientific extrapolation and credible science fiction (even though it often took dramatic license with science), and managed to wedge in convincing dialogue and acting.

But . . . (and there's SPOILERS here)

[
[
[
[
[
[
[

I couldn't help feeling unsatisfied at the plotline, which followed not only  the tropes of earlier Cameron work (did anyone think the one-dimensional corporate shill in the plot would turn out to be any better than Paul Rieser in ALIENS?) but, well, DANCES WITH WOLVES, and lots of war movies and comics.  (I remember a few weeks ago I blogged about the stereotypical DC war comic story, in which a soldier separate from his unit takes out superior forces with a few well-placed grenades.  Uh . . . .)  I kept hoping that the storyline would have some kind of twist, travel 90 degrees from what you'd expect; but it still followed its designated path.

In particular, I thought Cameron might have been building toward an interesting twist with the Na'Vi's motives for revealing their secrets to Sully.  After all, the Na'vi are smart, and they know from the outset that Sully is (a) a warrior (b) of a people that they have had skirmishes with and (c) that he returns to his people whenever he sleeps (they call him a "dreamwalker").  Wouldn't they know that he was reporting to his people everything he saw?  Wouldn't they think that was his duty?  Wouldn't they do the same?  I thought that they might be revealing this information despite their awareness that he was betraying them, to work toward some larger purpose of diplomacy based on shared knowledge -- he would learn both sides' secrets and so be a go-between.  But instead, the Na'Vi are startled that Sully has been reporting on them.

Perhaps Cameron felt that moviegoers couldn't be pulled into this incredible world without being given a storyline that followed only familiar tropes.  Perhaps I'm expecting novel-type plotting in a movie that is jammed so full of visual spectacle and action that plot twists won't fit. 

I don't want to give the impression that AVATAR is a bad movie, or that I didn't enjoy it.  But I think that it's building a base for a new kind of SF movie -- one that actually brings to life the visions that could only be written about before -- and I'd like to see its potential used to full advantage.

Blogged with the Flock Browser